Why Houston Rockets will miss Rick Adelman in the next season – NBA Feature (Part 1)
In Rick Adelman’s three season tenure the Houston Rockets made it to the National Basketball Association Playoffs once and that was in 2008, the year when Rick Adelman joined the franchise. With a 43-39 record in the preceding
season and differences over the direction of the Rockets, the 65 years old coach decided to leave his duties and move on.
When we take a bird’s eye view of Adelman’s stay with the Rockets, it seems that Houston’s decision of moving forward without Rick was rational, however, on close analysis we found out that his stint with the franchise wasn’t too
bad.
Adelman joined the Rockets when they just have two stars Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming, while the rest of the roster didn’t offer much.
However, Adelman started turning around things for the team, as he first formed a quality array of support players around Ming and McGrady. However, the pressure came on the veteran coach when both Yao and McGrady faced injuries
and had to spend most of their time on the sidelines. As a result of that Adelman had to live without the services of his two bright players in the first two years of his tenure, as they appeared in only few games during both seasons.
Still the vigilant coach was able to deliver good records in his first two seasons, as the Rockets made it to the playoffs with a 55-27 record and then in the next season Houston pulled almost a similar kind of numbers (53-29).
This was a great achievement considering the scenario that Adelman had to face, after losing the two key players.
It was the great vision of Adelman that made centre Chuck Hayes the centrepiece of the Rockets, who didn’t let his coach down too and helped the team secure fifth spot in back to back seasons. However, after the departure of Adelman,
the Rockets got the services Kevin McHale, who was famous for his low post game back in 80’s and 90’s when he used to play with Boston.
The Rockets are now looking to push up the young talent in the side like Terrence Williams, Jordan Hill and Hasheem Thabeet. These three didn’t get much playing time during coach Adelman’s period. It remains to be seen how this
new strategy will work for the Rockets and how McHale carries this forward.
However, the Rockets are going to miss their ex-coach because of his extra ordinary approach and vision that helped the team achieved difficult tasks in the past. Let’s see what exactly the Rockets will miss about Adelman.
Kevin McHale lacks experience
Prior joining the Rockets, McHale had two short stints with NBA teams as an interim coach that didn’t tell much about the skill of the new hire. All the hype that McHale so far had gathered was through the word of mouth that was
spread by the Rockets General Manger, Daryl Morey, besides that there isn’t much.
McHale’s longest interim coaching tenure came with the Minnesota Timberwolves, where he was able to produce a 20-43 record. One of the reasons for not performing well was deficiency of solid players in the team’s roster.
So McHale had to do pretty well in order to take the best out of the Rockets, because in comparison to Adelman, Kevin don’t have enough experience as a head coach and like Rick he had never worked with the young team.
So it remains to be seen how well the new coach will do especially when there will be no Yao Ming.
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